Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About White Privilege

Wayne Allyn Root

My name is Wayne Allyn Root. I'm an SOB (son of a butcher). I understand this "white privilege" controversy like no one person on Earth.

I've never had it. I've never even had a whiff of it. That's why I have no "white guilt." I have nothing to be guilty about. But I have met plenty of privileged white kids. You know what you call them? Liberal Democrats. More on that in a minute.

First, my background. My Jewish ancestors were far more likely to be slaves than to have one. My ancestors were persecuted, abused, robbed, enslaved and murdered by government -- just like Black Americans.

My Jewish grandparents got to America in the early 1900s -- long after slavery. They settled in New York City, not the South. If they ever met anyone from the Ku Klux Klan, it was only because they were being persecuted by white extremists -- just like Black Americans.

My father fought in World War II and faced sure death at Okinawa. Was that "white privilege"? He spent the rest of his life as a blue-collar butcher. He woke at 3 a.m. every day to drive to the meat market in the dark and freezing cold and buy the wholesale meat he'd sell at his shop. My father struggled his entire life as a working-class man and died with an estate of nothing (other than his home).

He worried every hour of every day how he'd pay his bills. No one gave him anything in his life -- let alone because he was white.

So, where was his "white privilege"? Can liberals please explain where all that hidden privilege was? Because my dad's story is the story of most middle-class white Americans. We are the "silent majority" that supports President Donald Trump. We've never caught a whiff of "white privilege."

My personal story is all about Black and white. I attended a rough urban high school on the Bronx borderline that was 90% Black. I was one of the few white kids out of 4,000 students. I was tortured 24/7 for being "the minority." I was beaten a hundred times. I was chased home from school, terrified, fearing for my life. My lunch money was stolen so often I stopped going to lunch. I knew better than to ever go to the school bathroom. That's where kids were terrorized and robbed. I was almost murdered by a thug with a machete. Is that what you call "white privilege"?

But, eventually, I learned to fight, knocked out a few bullies, became an athlete and won my classmates' respect. I graduated valedictorian and was accepted to my dream school, Columbia University.

That's where I first learned about "white privilege." As a matter of fact, almost every one of my classmates at Columbia University had it. They were almost all lucky-sperm-club, spoiled-brat, filthy-rich kids with rich, powerful fathers who opened every door for them, greased every wheel. They had everything handed to them on a silver platter, with no effort necessary.

Now that's white privilege.

Oh, and where did all these little spoiled brats with "white privilege" wind up? Today, my Ivy League classmates are mostly powerful politicians, lawyers and media figures.

So, "white privilege" is real. But it is only enjoyed by 1 percent of 1 percent of 1 percent of the country. And trust me, virtually every one of them is a liberal Democrat. Every classmate I ever met who was born rich was a liberal Democrat who hated Ronald Reagan, hated white people (even though they were all white), hated capitalism and hated America.

Today, they all hate President Trump.

So, yes, there is "white privilege." But it isn't me. Don't try to hang that guilt trip on me. I have no white guilt. This son of a butcher has earned every ounce of my success. That applies to 99 percent of the 63 million Trump voters. No one ever gave us anything. We don't owe anyone anything. "White privilege" exists. But we've never experienced it.

So, it's a free country. Everyone has free speech. March and protest for Black Lives Matter to your heart's content. Just do it peacefully. And understand that the tiny percentage of Americans who actually have "white privilege" are spoiled-brat, Ivy League-educated white liberals.

Whenever you meet a liberal lawyer, powerful Democratic politician or member of the media, there's your "white privilege." They're the ones you should be angry with. They're the ones you should be protesting.

So much for "white privilege."

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JK Rowling blasts Labour as she hits back at shadow minister Lloyd Russell-Moyle who had claimed she was exploiting her sex assault ordeal in transgender row

JK Rowling has hit out at a Labour frontbencher who accused her of 'using her own sexual assault as justification for discriminating,' against the transgender community.

This morning Lloyd Russell-Moyle, a shadow environment minister, wrote a grovelling apology for comments he made in The Tribune about the Harry Potter author.

JK Rowling has hit back, warning people are 'concerned' about Labour's position on women's rights after saying: 'When so-called leftists like (Lloyd Russell-Moyle) demand that we give up our hard won sex-based rights, they align themselves squarely with men’s rights activists.

'To both groups, female trauma is white noise, an irrelevance, or else exaggerated or invented.'

Ms Rowling has found herself the subject of vicious trolling and accusations of being transphobic after responding to a headline on an online article discussing 'people who menstruate'. In a tweet, she said: 'I'm sure there used to be a word for those people. Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?'

Stung by criticism, the writer – whose Harry Potter books have sold more than 500 million copies worldwide – sought to justify her decision to speak out in a deeply personal essay.

Recalling how the trauma of 'a serious sexual assault I suffered in my twenties' had informed her thinking about the trans issue and women's rights, Ms Rowling explained: 'Like every other domestic abuse and sexual assault survivor I know, I feel nothing but empathy and solidarity with trans women who've been abused by men.'

Trans-rights activist Mr Russell-Moyle, claimed the author was 'using her own sexual assault' to justify her views on transgender issues in an article for left-wing magazine Tribune.

Hitting back in a series of tweets on Sunday evening, Ms Rowling wrote: 'This morning, Mr Russell-Moyle issued an apology on Twitter, although he didn’t trouble to tag me in. Coincidentally, his change of heart occurred after his remarks were repeated in national newspapers with higher circulations than.'

She told followers she had been 'moved to tears' after receiving more than 3,000 emails 'thanking me for speaking up,' about the abuse she had suffered.

Ms Rowling went on to say: 'As I stated in my essay, my primary worry is the risks to vulnerable women. As everyone knows, I’m no longer reliant on communal facilities, nor am I likely to be imprisoned or need a women's refuge any time soon. I’m not arguing for the privileged, but the powerless.'

She ended her Twitter thread by writing: 'I accept (Mr Russel-Moyle's) apology in the hope that he’ll dig a little deeper than hashtags and slogans. He might then understand why increasing numbers of people are deeply concerned about Labour’s position on women’s rights.'

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Hope for the Muslim world?

FOR YEARS, Saudi Arabia worked tirelessly to export Wahhabism, its home-grown strain of intolerant Islam, to Muslim communities worldwide. It poured many billions of dollars into funding mosques, schools, and cultural organizations that promoted Islamist extremism — an extremism capable of turning murderous, as Americans learned on Sept. 11, 2001, when 19 Al-Qaeda terrorists, 15 of them Saudi citizens, murdered thousands of people.

Given the link between Saudi Arabia's monarchy and the rise of radical Islam, Muhammad al-Issa might not be your idea of a typical Saudi cleric.

The 55-year-old secretary general of the Muslim World League, a graduate of Imam Muhammad bin Saud University with a degree in comparative Islamic jurisprudence, has become a leading exponent of moderate Islam. Al-Issa vigorously criticizes religious extremism and vocally supports interfaith cooperation. He has been hailed by Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the Catholic archbishop of New York, as the "most eloquent spokesperson in the Islamic world for reconciliation and friendship among the religions" and extolled by the president of the Mormon church, Russell Nelson, as "a peacemaker [and] a bridge-builder."

Especially notable has been Al-Issa's insistence on condemning hate crimes against Jews, including the lethal synagogue shootings in Pittsburgh and Poway, Calif. In January he led a Muslim delegation to Auschwitz, then published a column calling Holocaust denial a "crime" that should appall true Muslims. This month, speaking from Mecca to an online conference on antisemitism, he said he had made it his "mission to work with my brothers and sisters of the Jewish faith" to advance interreligious harmony, and "to confront the extremists ... falsely claiming inspiration from our religious texts."

Naturally, some of those extremists were incensed by Al-Issa's words. On Qatar's state-owned Al-Jazeera network, senior anchor Ahmed Mansour sneered that the Saudi sheikh must have been angling for "the Great Medal of the Zionist," while the Muslim Brotherhood writer Mohamed Shanqiti mocked him for describing Jews as "brothers and sisters."

Clearly it is significant that a Saudi religious leader and politician (Al-Issa was his country's minister of justice from 2009 to 2015) is impassioned in defense of religious tolerance and so strongly opposes "political Islam," or Islamism — the supremacist doctrine that all societies must be ruled by uncompromising Islamic law. Al-Issa's moderation and open-mindedness are 180 degrees removed from the totalitarianism of the Taliban, ISIS, Nigeria's Boko Haram, or the hardline regime in Iran.

Yet Al-Issa's views haven't prevailed in his own land, either. Saudi Arabia is among the most unfree nations on earth, particularly for religious minorities and dissenters. Dissidents, reformers, and human-rights activists are frequently arrested, imprisoned, or brutalized. The grisly murder of Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul shocked the world. There have been real reforms in Saudi Arabia in recent years, but the country is still far from anything resembling Al-Issa's vision of openness.

Winston Churchill described Russia in 1939 as "a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma." But, Churchill added, "perhaps there is a key." If the same is true today of Saudi Arabia, perhaps the key to its internal contradictions is that Islamism is in retreat — not just in Saudi society, but across much of the Muslim world.

Writing in the Boston Globe four years ago, Daniel Pipes suggested that there were two weaknesses that might bring about an unraveling of the Islamist movement. One was internecine fighting among Islamists themselves — the classic dynamic of one-time allies turning on each other as they compete for dominance. Of that there have been examples aplenty, such as the falling out in Turkey between Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and the religious leader Fethullah Gülen, or the bitter clash in Iran between Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

But "the bigger peril for the movement," Pipes wrote, was rising unpopularity — "as populations experience Islamist rule firsthand, they reject it." He pointed to the widespread antipathy of ordinary Iranians to the theocratic regime in Tehran, and to the massive demonstrations in Egypt against the Muslim Brotherhood government of Mohamed Morsi in 2013.

Today, there is a profusion of indications that Islamism is losing its grip.

"Across the Arab world people are turning against religious political parties and the clerics who helped bring them to power," the Economist reported in December. In Iraq, Lebanon, and other Muslim-majority countries, the Arab Barometer polling network finds a notable drop in trust for Islamist political parties and a declining share of Arabs who think religious leaders should have influence over government. The Turkish analyst Mustafa Aykol writes that there has been a backlash to Islamism in the form of "a new secular wave breeding in the Muslim world." Another Turkish scholar, sociologist Mucahit Bilici, concludes: "Today Islamism in Turkey is associated in the public mind with corruption and injustice."

The 2019 Arab Youth Survey, a study of 3,300 men and women between 18 and 24 in the Middle East and North Africa, found that two-thirds believe "religion plays too big of a role in the Middle East" and 79 percent believe that "the Arab world needs to reform its religious institutions."

This may be what is unfolding, ever so gradually, in Saudi Arabia: a halting shift to moderate Islam in what was the world's foremost exporter of radical Islam. There are no guarantees, of course; this may be only a lull between storms. But the rise of so outspoken a Saudi moderate as Muhammad al-Issa offers reason for encouragement. For decades, Saudi Arabia peddled a version of Islam that was repressive and narrow-minded. Let us hope it now works just as assiduously to promote Al-Issa's message of tolerance, peace, and empathy, and thereby cultivate the very best in Muslim tradition.

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Knights of Columbus sue Delaware city for banning Nativity: 'Blatantly unlawful'

A local Knights of Columbus council in Delaware filed a federal lawsuit Tuesday against the city of Rehoboth Beach for banning its Nativity from the bandstand on the boardwalk.

The Knights chapter, affiliated with St. Edmond Catholic Church and represented by First Liberty Institute, Jones Day, and Morton, Valihura & Zerbato, LLC, is claiming religious discrimination after the city prohibited all religious holiday displays beginning in 2018, according to the lawsuit.

“The Knights of Columbus simply wants to continue a beloved tradition of this town,” Roger Byron, First Liberty senior counsel, said in a statement to Fox News.

The Knights said they aren't aware of any complaints made since the 1930s, when the Nativity scene started being displayed in the Rehoboth Beach community. They claim the city unfairly has a holiday scene organized by a private organization with a Christmas tree, holiday lights and a Santa House, all of which were with the Nativity before it was banned in 2018.

“It is perfectly lawful to have a crèche on public property, and blatantly unlawful to ban it," Byron added.

The city's compromise was to move the Nativity to leased property a half-mile from the display at the Bandstand Circle, upsetting locals, including Crabby Dick's Restaurant, which put up the sign: "Wake up Rehoboth Beach (sic) Jesus is the reason for the season," The Daily Times reported.

When the controversy arose again in December, Mayor Paul Kuhns told the local news the city is being inclusive and won't be changing the policy anytime soon.

“I think from the perspective of the city it’s easier to not have anything and allow on any kind of private property any kind of display that anybody would like to do,” Kuhns told WMDT.

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The Ideological View of Poverty, Wealth and Civilization

Jordan Peterson

The following is from a draft of my upcoming book, Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life

The poor are poor, so goes the [Leftist] ideological story, because they are oppressed (with no consideration given to their characteristics as individuals).

But the poor are poor for many reasons. Corruption, addiction, poor mental or physical health, lack of education, unwillingness to work (as conscientiousness is a normally distributed trait), narcissism, psychopathy, social upheaval, economic downturns, natural disaster—the list is virtually endless, and the cause cannot be laid simple-mindedly at the feet of the insufficient and corrupt social structure (even though it is insufficient, compared to what we would like; even though it is corrupt, compared to what it could be. But some perspective and some gratitude is in order).

The rich are rich because they are oppressors

With no consideration given to their potential competence and productivity and desire to improve the lot of those around them and to mentor and lead and to strive for self-improvement and to compete and cooperate in a fair and just manner and to accept additional responsibility and to solve complex problems and to take extreme entrepreneurial risks and engage in philanthropy and to leave a better world for their children and grandchildren

All of western civilization is the result of patriarchal oppression. All political, economic, religious and philosophical systems are based on the desire for power. Race (or class, or gender, or ethnicity) is the prime determinant of human value.

This is the replacement of actual knowledge with mere verbal fluency. You are not correct, merely because you can make an argument, even a good argument, nor because you can make your opponent’s position appear absurd (particularly if he or she is not particularly capable of verbal sparring). You are not correct if you spend your time creating straw man, and then lighting them on fire. There is nothing productive or good about this line of argumentation. It is mere simplification for the purposes of inciting divisiveness, regenerating tribalism, and justifying revenge. Of course the system is rife with problems. That’s not the point. Compared to what? The past? The present, in the rest of the world? And what are you planning to do, in your ideological certainty, to make even one thing better, without insisting that someone else changes to ensure that improvement occurs? 

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 
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